Student Becomes Teacher
by foojules
Summary: "A Real Education" universe. Sybil Crawley doesn't know it yet, but her world is about to be rocked by a virgin who CAN drive.
1. Chapter 1

_AN: This is something I wrote a while back as a sort of exercise and then shelved: Sybil's first look at Tom and her thoughts leading up to approaching him. Since I haven't updated _A Real Education_ in a while, I thought I'd put it out there. Hope you enjoy!_

* * *

_OK, this is starting to get creepy._

She'd been shadowing him for the last twenty minutes like something out of a Cold War-era farce. The brogue had caught her ear through the clink of crockery and the jangle of whatever nonthreatening indie pop they had on heavy rotation this week. But it was his eyes—good God, they practically _glowed _across the café when he turned round—that made her snap her book shut and stuff it into her bag. She'd pitched her still half-full cup into the bin on her way out and stuffed a stick of gum into her mouth. _Just in case._

They'd gone up South U and into Ulrich's, where she'd feigned interest in a display of maize-and-blue sports memorabilia while he asked about something at the textbook counter. He had left empty-handed, but not before smiling at the girl behind the till, those eyes crinkling up in a way that just screamed _I've got a sense of humor! And I'm probably great in bed! _Now he was crossing the Diag, Sybil closing the distance between them ever so gradually and trying to work up the nerve to talk to him.

For once she had no idea what to say. The sensation was unfamiliar, and deeply unpleasant for a girl who'd always been able to talk to anyone. _Anyone_. On her last visit home she'd got stuck entertaining a friend of Granny's and had ended up describing what it was like to attend an American football tailgate, to the lady's polite bemusement. Later that evening Granny had wearily requested that Sybil refrain from using the phrase "beer bong" in the drawing room ever again.

_Oh, this is ridiculous. Just... say something!_

It wasn't that he was particularly intimidating. On the contrary, he looked… well, _nice _was much too bland a word, too fraught with unflattering connotations, but even from a distance his eyes looked _kind_. He wasn't overly tall or _too _handsome, didn't have that almost feminine beauty that Sybil, rightly or wrongly, associated with men who called when they felt like it (never often enough) and never, _ever _stayed at a party for even one minute after they'd stopped having fun, no matter how Sybil felt, or if they did they'd pout for days afterward. _This _guy looked reasonably well-adjusted, as far as one could tell from ten yards away and never having spoken to him. He didn't look as though he'd think he was special and scarred because he was afraid of bloody heights or something.

She smiled as he tossed his cup end-over-end into a bin, tea-bag string trailing, after sipping and shaking his head in what she could tell even from behind was disgust. _He knows what he likes_, she thought, and almost laughed at herself. She'd barely seen the bloke's face and already she was ascribing personality traits based on the way he disposed of his rubbish. _Well, at least now you know he doesn't litter. _She stifled a grin and continued to watch him. He strode across the quad decisively but not hurriedly, his head swiveling slightly in either direction, taking in his surroundings. Sybil liked to do the same when she walked. Just because you had somewhere to be didn't mean you couldn't enjoy the view en route.

_Case in point_, she thought, her eyes straying to his lower half, and not for the first time. _I do like a man who can fill out the back of his trousers. _Then she _did _laugh, more of a snort really, before straightening her face with a rather severe inner admonishment to act her age and either leave off ogling the guy or strike up a conversation already. _And what's the worst that could happen?_ Sybil was not someone who worried much about rejection; if a man she approached wasn't interested, she shrugged and figured it just wasn't meant to be. Truth be told, more often than not she was the one turning them away. She didn't get satisfaction out of that the way some girls she knew did—well, not _much _satisfaction—but it happened often enough that she was well aware of her appeal to the opposite sex. So there was a pretty good chance that calling out to Mr. Blue-Eyes-Nice-Arse would lead to a coffee or a drink or a meal together, further interactions to be determined. That was Sybil's favorite part of relationships: that spark, the anticipation, _what's going to happen? Could be anything _before dreary reality set in. And it always did set in at some point. With the last guy it had been when Sybil realized halfway through dinner—their first together, which she'd agreed to against her better judgement—that apparently he was _not _going to stop talking about how television was in the midst of a golden age. She liked to lose herself in a bit of telly as much as the next person, but she'd never made weekend plans around "marathoning" a series (nor had she ever used the word "marathon" as a verb). _Not meant to be. _But just how many _not meant to be_s could one woman be expected to endure?

But this was no time for pessimism. _Start as you mean to go on_ was what her sister always said, Mary with her wry smiles and determined Englishness. Wise advice from someone who'd come through her share of trouble. _Keep an open mind_: more good advice, always having an American twang in Sybil's mind, though her mother usually issued it in connection to something that would require adherence to tradition rather than the opposite. And then there was Sybil's own experience, which had taught her that even if the train eventually derailed, the stops along the way could still be tremendous fun.

Blue Eyes was approaching the midpoint of the Diag, Sybil hot on his heels, and she made up her mind to speak up. All at once she felt an urgency, as though she needed to make her move before he reached a certain point or she'd lose the game. It didn't really matter what her opening was; only that she had one. She'd opened her mouth before she even knew what she was going to say, trusting that it would all fall into place.

She was right.


	2. Chapter 2

_AN: So I guess I (sort of) have a contrib for smut weekend after all! Thanks to the Yankee Countess for, ahem, device related inspiration._

* * *

At the muffled thump of the outer door closing, Sybil let out her breath. She hadn't been aware she was so keyed up, but it was no wonder, considering the singularity of tonight's events. She felt curiously positive about it all, though. The embarrassment, both first- and second-hand, had faded quickly; not for Tom, she suspected, and she regretted making him feel as though she was kicking him out. She really should've realized how the words would sound before she said them.

Despite her very real exhaustion, sleep was elusive. She was still horny, for one thing. God, that was the first time in a _while _that she'd been _that _turned on; another reason his admission had taken her aback. No one with as little experience as he professed should be able to get a woman so worked up. She was mildly surprised to find her thoughts returning not to what had happened here in her room before things went pear-shaped, but to that kiss on Brian's hearth. Tom's mouth, soft on hers but eager with barely restrained desire; the oddly satisfying scrape of his emergent stubble on her face. The shocking velvety feel of his tongue against hers. His gentle fingertips brushing her cheeks, his hands in her hair, making her think of how they'd feel on her.

Her mind ran over and over the memory, backward and forward, stroking it like a lover's skin; like she wanted to stroke his again. Her heart sped up and her breath caught and she smiled slightly. It reminded her of being eleven and fantasizing about kissing a celebrity or a boy in school, before she'd had more than a vague idea of what came after kissing.

If she was honest, the thought of being the more experienced one was rather a turn-on than otherwise. Obviously he'd felt the spark as much as she. Sybil didn't find standoffishness in men especially intriguing; if someone was into her, she wanted to know about it, and Tom had most certainly let her know. And it wasn't just about sex with him, either. She'd known as early as dinner that there was something. There was definitely something.

She'd have to be the one to pursue it, of course. Small chance of him ringing her; she felt her face get hot again when she remembered how blithely she'd told him she wanted to sleep. And why shouldn't he think she was trying to get rid of him? He'd probably thought she was just out for a hookup, the way she'd hustled him back to her place. _I'll fix it_. _Tomorrow_.

Meanwhile, it was becoming apparent that she wouldn't be able to sleep without a little help. With a sigh that was half exasperated and half anticipatory, she rolled over and opened her bedside table drawer. Behind last year's diary and a snarl of orphaned hair ties was a small cloth bag containing something much more frequently used. _Hope the batteries haven't gone off, or I'll just have to do this the old-fashioned way. _She tested the switch (smiling when it rewarded her with a high-pitched buzzing sound) flopped onto her back, and burrowed her weighted hand underneath the sheet. _Lord, I don't even _need _lube._

She started by taking herself back to the hearth and the kiss, but it didn't take long for the images running through her brain to become distinctly unchaste. And the sounds as well; she remembered the little moan he'd made when she put her tongue in his mouth. Her breath came faster as she thought about the things she'd like to do to make him moan again.

And the things _he _could do. In her mind he tore off her clothes in a fog of lust. Then he removed each article painstakingly slowly, a button at a time followed by his lips and the shocking dart of his tongue until she couldn't stand the teasing. He bent her over the bed and rammed his cock into her until she screamed, then he raised worshipful eyes to her face, gentle hands to her breasts, as she rose above him. She didn't want it to end too soon; again and again she brought herself to the edge. Finally she couldn't take it any longer and came, shivering, to an internal reel of her riding him as he sat on the bed and attacked her breasts with his mouth. She bit her lip to stifle the moan that came out.

She switched off the vibrator with her thumb, but for a while after that she couldn't manage more than lying spread-eagled and feeling her heartbeat go back to its normal speed. As self-administered orgasms went, that one, as her American friends said, was a doozy. She didn't bother to be concerned with what Tom would think of her appropriating his likeness for her fantasies; it was an open question whether he'd ever know about them, and even more doubtful that they'd ever happen, or that she even wanted half of them to. They were, after all, fantasies.

She nestled her shoulders more deeply into the mattress, pulled the sheet up around her neck, and closed her eyes with a sigh. _If he thinks he's seen the last of me, he is quite mistaken. _


	3. Chapter 3

_AN: For magfreak, who asked if I could write Sybil's take on her and Tom's first time having sex and/or her, ahem, _~first time~_ with Tom, if you know what I mean, nudge nudge wink wink. This falls during Chapter 5 in A Real Education._

* * *

November: Before

Sybil had been studying for hours, she had hours more to go, and she was dying for a Coke. She hardly ever had fizzy drinks but she'd earned one, damn it, so on her way home from the library she stopped into a corner shop, glancing at the magazine covers on her way to the coolers on the back wall. Magazines were another sometime indulgence for her, but none of the current issues seemed unmissable. More of the same old, same old: Photoshopped actresses vamping and headlines shouting that she could _Lose That Stubborn 10 Pounds_ and _Dress Like a Celeb_ and _Make Him Go 'Nuts' With Desire._ The last made her roll her eyes; she hoped someone at _Cosmo _had been demoted over that pun.

She opened her Coke as soon as she stepped outside, right there on the pavement, and the first swallow was pure heaven. Almost orgasmic, you might say.

Unlike some things. She found herself thinking again of that headline. Why was it, she wondered, that women's magazines hardly ever seemed to focus on the woman's satisfaction? She'd buy ten copies of one that promised to tell her how to _Let Your Man Know (Kindly) How to Bloody Well Make You Come Already. _Oh, she'd read plenty of articles that purported to do just that: "Communication is the key!" the authors would chirp. "Just tell him what you want!" Easy enough to say, but Sybil had difficulty imagining a truly hot lovemaking session that involved any instructions more detailed than _Just like that, baby_ or _yes, yes, yes. _Needless to say, she and Tom were not quite to the multiple-yes stage. Most sex advice columnists (whom Sybil always imagined as looking like a cross between Carrie Bradshaw and Zooey Deschanel) had probably not considered that their readers might be dealing with a partner for whom condoms were unfamiliar territory, never mind the clitoris.

Sybil finished her drink, tossed the can into a recycling bin, and turned into her neighborhood, now firmly entrenched in worries about her sex life when she should be thinking about cell biology. Things had basically ended in disaster the last time she and Tom had been together. She'd probably crossed a line with the quip about practicing with a banana, but she hadn't expected him to be so touchy. He had his insecurities about his bedroom performance, but usually he tried to downplay them, or at least keep a sense of humor about it. This must be at least as difficult for him as it was for her. She hated to be peevish about it—after all, it wasn't as if he wasn't trying—and she hadn't been untruthful when she'd told Tom that orgasms weren't essential for her, but that was based on the premise that she would actually get to have some.

She walked around the back of her house, unlocked her apartment door, and stepped inside out of the whiplash wind. She dropped her rucksack on the couch and turned on the light; the room was dim, even though it was midafternoon. It got dark so much earlier these days. From the feel of it, they were in for a hard winter. She sat down, got out her notes, and tried to read.

She'd never been overly preoccupied with her own welfare in any arena. She'd found she was happiest whilst making others happy, so it hadn't seemed odd to her to put Tom's satisfaction first. She knew it could be alienating when she truly concentrated on herself during sex. During the airing-of-grievances phase of her last break-up, her partner—who'd plainly still been smarting from not having the feelings he'd expressed for her returned—had informed her that she'd often made him feel like a living dildo. The last thing she wanted was to freak Tom out, or cut herself off from him in any way.

She chewed on the end of her highlighter. _Maybe I should just fake an orgasm and be done with it._

Even the most retrograde of the magazines didn't suggest _that_, but Sybil had friends who'd admitted doing it. She never had, with Larry or anyone else. It had always seemed counterproductive to pretend your partner's ministrations were having the desired effect when they weren't. But sex, after all, depended upon confidence, and it seemed Tom's could use a bit of bolstering. It would just be the once.

Except it probably wouldn't, and it wouldn't be fair to Tom or to herself. She could just see his face if he found out she'd been faking. Even if she took the secret to her grave, small dishonesties tended to lead to larger ones. Sybil didn't like the idea of such an important part of her relationship resting on lies, even in the short term.

She wouldn't let herself think too much about the long term yet. She did know that what she had with Tom was different to anything that had come before. With other men there'd been easy rapport, there'd been interesting conversation, there'd been good sex, there'd been all of the ingredients that supposedly made up a functional romance. But other men had all stayed neatly in the boxes she'd given them. They'd never been present even when they weren't in the room with her. They'd never made her lose focus.

She hadn't fallen in love with them.

Enough of that: these codons weren't going to memorize themselves. But even as she turned her attention to her work the voice in the back of her mind continued its sly whispering: _All right, so you're in love with him. What are you going to do about it?_

The only thing she could do. Let him know, and hope like mad that he loved her too.

-ooo-

After

"I've got to have something to eat."

Tom made no move to rise. In fact, he rolled toward Sybil so that his leg and arm draped over her, pinning her down so that she couldn't get up, even if she'd had a mind to.

Which she most assuredly did not. She giggled, which she hardly ever did. "That's at least the third time you've said that. And yet…. here we stay." It was late afternoon on Saturday and they'd hardly got out of bed since last night; she should probably be studying, but she couldn't bring herself to care. She'd smoked pot a handful of times (one could hardly avoid it, in the hippie capital of the Rust Belt) but she'd never got such a fizzy euphoria from it. _Love is definitely my drug of choice_, she thought, and giggled again.

"Can you blame me?" He nuzzled her. "If I have to starve, I guess it may as well be in bed…" he nipped at her neck and she squealed, then shivered as his mouth grew more insistent. "...With the most beautiful woman on earth." His hand glided feather-like over her breast and down her stomach and she pressed into it, her breath suddenly hard to find, eyes falling shut.

But then, with a groan, he pushed himself up and off the bed. "OK, I'm going to go and get us some takeaway before we really do starve." He began casting about for his clothes. "Anything in particular you want?"

She shook her head. "You don't have to go out. I've plenty of stuff in the fridge, I just need to make it…"

"That's at least the third time you've said _that_. And yet..." He grinned and leaned down for a kiss, which turned into another, which turned into Sybil twining her arms round his neck and pulling him down to her. He gently disentangled himself. "I'll be back in twenty minutes." One more kiss. "And then we'll have energy for the night ahead." He gave her a look that sent a thrill through her, and was gone.

She shifted and pushed herself up to half-sit sideways on the bed. As she did her tummy rumbled loudly enough to make her put a hand over it with a sheepish grin; she _was_ hungry. Breakfast had been tea and toast, followed by each other; they'd eaten nothing since then. And Tom was right: they'd need sustenance for the evening she had planned.

But for now, she shrugged into her dressing gown and went into the bathroom. She decided on a shower after a moment's vacillation (and a sniff at her underarms); while the water got hot, she inspected her face in the mirror. It bore no sign of her abbreviated night, though to be fair, she'd slept like a baby once she and Tom had finally drifted off in each other's arms, and they'd been napping throughout the day.

After a few minutes in the shower she noticed she was humming. She smiled and opened her mouth to sing—badly, Mary had the musical talent in their family—but with all the soul she could muster. She stayed under the water for a long time, letting her skin grow warm and pink and her lungs expand in the steamy air. Maybe Tom would join her when he came back. He'd been perfectly adorable all last night and today, like a kid with a new toy who didn't want to stop playing with it, but so solicitous.

She hadn't wanted to stop playing either. Between last night and today she'd come five times… or was it six? She chuckled, thinking about the time she'd spent worrying about faking orgasms and Tom's fragile ego as though it were years in the past. She didn't have any sense that their connectedness during the past eighteen hours was an anomaly; the floodgates had opened, the walls crumbled. Whatever mental block had existed seemed well and truly obliterated.

And Sybil knew why, at least on her side. She'd been able to let herself go with other partners because she didn't care as much. With Tom she did, and so she couldn't. But once she could be sure she was safe with him, that he knew how she felt and he felt the same way, any unconscious hesitation had melted away.

Eventually she turned off the water, stepped out of the tub, and toweled off. The door to her apartment thumped open and closed while she was rubbing moisturizer into her skin, and a minute later Tom's voice floated down the hall over the rustle of plastic carrier bags. "You still in bed, love?"

He turned and smiled as she approached, wrapped in her baggy flannel dressing gown with her wet hair finger-combed. "I got Thai food…" He left off unpacking their dinner and crossed to her for a kiss. "Hi, beautiful."

"I'm glad you think I'm beautiful like this."

"Why wouldn't I?" He shrugged. "You're always gorgeous." He said it so matter-of-factly that Sybil couldn't stop the grin spreading across her face, and he grinned back. "Well, you are." She moved across the kitchen to take bowls out of the cabinet, and he followed, wrapping his arms around her waist from behind. Soon enough his hand found its way inside her robe; soon after that she twisted around to give him a long slow kiss, dinner all but forgotten.

She remembered a few minutes later. "The food's going to get cold," she murmured, not caring.

Tom leaned back, but only to pull his shirt over his head and drop it on the floor. "Funny," he said, "I don't feel as hungry as I did before."

Sybil smiled and wrapped her arms around him more tightly. "Me neither."


	4. Chapter 4

_Happy Sybil/Tom smut weekend! :) This is in response to a prompt from Yankeecountess, who asked if I could write the first time Tom goes down on Sybil. Here it is! The action takes place during chapter 7 in the timeline of A Real Education, a few days after their disagreement/fight about Samantha's abortion._

* * *

Early December

They'd made up, but she felt wrong for days.

Not wrong as in incorrect(like she'd told Tom, they didn't have to agree on everything). Wrong as in off kilter, uncomfortable, like biting the inside of your cheek and the raw place jumping between your teeth every time you tried to eat for the next week. It had been their first real fight, and Sybil hated fighting. But more than that, they hadn't seen each other since early Wednesday morning and though they were no longer angry with each other, things hadn't yet had the chance to return to normal.

On Friday he texted wondering if he should come round (was that uncertainty? Normally he'd just have asked if he should bring takeaway) and she texted back _Yeah of course! I'll make dinner_ with a nonchalance she wasn't even close to feeling. She spent the rest of the afternoon in a low-grade pet, fretting about whether it would be weird when he showed up.

But it wasn't weird. It was lovely, and they slipped back into their rapport so easily that it made Sybil want to laugh with relief. They only mentioned Samantha once, when Tom's committee leader rang him to say she wasn't feeling well and could he cover her working the church rummage sale the next morning, and though Sybil could tell he was still turning the thing over in his mind, he didn't seem inclined to make an issue of it. Or go off and do (or say) anything stupid. She was glad. The last thing she felt like was having another row over something that wasn't even their business.

So things were mostly smoothed over even before they made it into the bedroom, and Sybil knew from experience that sex would finish the job. Not in a superficial _Oh let's just fuck to distract ourselves from our troubles _way—even Tuesday's little session in Tom's shower hadn't been that. They'd only been burning off the fuel that could destroy them if allowed to smolder for too long, and tonight would wipe away any scorch marks. She was ready to get to it, and not just for the healing.

She'd spent much more of the last three days than she should have thinking about him taking her against the shower wall.

After dinner she didn't even let him finish the washing up, but snaked her arms round him from behind while he stood at the sink. When he turned to kiss her, it was so soft and gentle that it made her want to slow down, too. He moaned a little in the back of his throat, his wet hands moving up her back underneath her shirt. Her eyes fluttered half open. His were closed, a tiny crease between his eyebrows like he was in the midst of making a very earnest point, and she smiled.

The corners of his mouth came up in response, that little line smoothing. "What is it?"

"Nothing," she said. "It's just nice." She let her eyes close again.

He was the one to lead her into the bedroom, but she was the one to pull his T-shirt over his head. Impatient now, she pressed up against him and kissed down his neck to the hollow in his throat, right above where the hair started to grow on his chest. She could feel his pulse thrumming just under the skin: warm, alive, eager. He pulled at her shirt, fumbled at the clasps on her bra. "Let me," she said, and then she was half naked, taking his hands and molding them to her breasts. He laughed, delighted.

"You...you're so…"

_Horny,_ she almost said, but then didn't, and instead of finishing his sentence he groaned and kissed her again.

They lay down on the bed and soon both of their trousers were on the floor. They didn't speak. Sybil didn't feel just now as though they needed to say they loved each other, or that they were glad they weren't fighting any longer. She said it with a line of kisses from his shoulder to his chest, and heard it in his swooping half-chuckle as her tongue traced a circle around his nipple. At some point it switched in her mind from cementing a reconciliation to just _them_, being together, like always. Tom's wide sincere eyes and clever hands and the pleased little quirk in his mouth whenever he made her make a noise.

Some time later he was on top of her and they'd been naked and kissing for a while and Sybil was poised between enjoying the moment and longing for more; she could feel him, hard against her hip, and she was thinking about reaching down and guiding him inside her when his mouth moved from hers to the little hollow beneath her ear. She moaned at the gentle probing of his tongue.

"Oh, that feels good," she murmured. He'd learned what she liked, but she'd learned as well, to tell him when she liked it.

"Yeah?" She could hear his smile, even though her eyes were closed. He sucked hard enough to get a bit of a squeal out of her.

"_Mmm._ Yeah."

"How about this?" His mouth moved lower, brushing her shoulder, her collarbone.

She kept her eyes closed. "Yes." He kissed her breasts, his fingertips gliding just above her hipbone; in the velvet dark of her eyelids, she shivered. "_Yes…_"

"You cold?" She wasn't, though the duvet had slipped down. He tugged it back up to wrap the two of them in a cocoon of down. "Mmm…" The shudder of his warm tongue round her nipple, the light nip of his teeth.

"Oh, God, Tom…"

She opened her eyes. He lay a soft kiss on her ribs, then her tummy, and smiled up at her, his face shadowed by the covers. It occurred to her to wonder if he was going where he looked to be going. He wasn't a complete innocent, at least some of those bloody films must have more than sucking and fucking. Or maybe he was just going on intuition. But he seemed in no particular rush, and neither was she, though she felt a sudden, emphatic flutter somewhere below her stomach. She smiled back, encouragingly, and he lowered his head to graze her skin with his lips once again.

He put his hands on her inner thighs, spreading them further apart, and Sybil grinned at the ceiling and thought that maybe it was true there was a first time for everything.

She didn't expect him to stay down there. No one ever had before: in her experience, guys just didn't enjoy giving head. At the extreme end of the spectrum, Larry (who'd always been quick enough to push _her _head down) had seemed mildly disgusted by the idea, never even made a feint at it. Her subsequent partners had been more game, but even they'd offered no more than a few token licks. Sybil had taken that as a sign that the majority of men considered it a chore at best. She'd always been satisfied with other aspects of sex. She would have been perfectly fine, _especially _this first time, with Tom trying it out and emerging from the duvet for the more conventional kind of fun.

But then…but _then_.

It took her completely by surprise, the rush through her at a certain light stroke of his tongue, and she moaned much more loudly than she would have done otherwise. He reacted to it immediately. Not with the full-steam-ahead treatment he might have a few weeks previous, but actually pulling back a little, making his mouth softer and somehow _warmer._ She sucked in her breath and he let out a little groan, then another, diving in as though he couldn't help himself, his grip tightening on her thighs as if he were unconscious of what his hands were doing. This...oh God, this was actually turning him on.

The effect on Sybil was profound. In no time she was panting, hips thrusting and heart pounding and fists grabbing at the sheets, her awareness reduced to the one square centimeter of her body that he circumnavigated awkwardly, but with enthusiasm. "Oh," he murmured, "Oh, Sybil," and the vibration of his voice, one more revolution of his eager tongue, sent her over so suddenly she cried out in as much surprise as pleasure.

Twenty quivering seconds later, Tom lifted his head and regarded her through the tunnel of blankets between his head and hers. He looked uncertain. "Erm, did you just…"

God, she was still shaking. "Yeah." She plopped her head back on the pillow, letting out an airy, incredulous chuckle. "Holy _shit_," she whispered, half to herself.

"So that was…that was good, then?"

She picked up her head to look down at him and had to laugh at the expression on his face. _Tentatively cocky,_ she would have called it, if such a thing existed. And well he should be feeling good about himself. _Oh Tom, I love you._ "Yes. _Yes_, it was gooooooohhhh—whoa!" She swiveled her hips away involuntarily; he'd dipped his head again, his tongue sending a blast of sensation through her. "Too much! Too much."

"Sorry," he breathed, but he didn't move, just focused his attention elsewhere, though still in the general neighborhood, fluttering kisses on top of her _mons venus_. She shivered.

"Tom…don't you want to…" She ran her hands over his shoulders, not quite tugging upward on them.

"Mm. I'm happy where I am, if I'm honest." His mouth moved further afield: loose on her hipbone, then an abrupt sucking kiss on her inner thigh that made her gasp. That was going to leave a mark. He flicked his eyes up to her with a look somewhere between puppy and wolf. "Do _you_ want to?"

_Yes._ She could feel the ache, that longing to have him inside her, his chest pressed against hers, his arms surrounding her and his mouth on hers. But she also wanted to see if she could feel that mind-blanking, eyes-rolling-back-in-the-head thermonuclear explosion again.

His fingers, making a gentle foray, decided her. She pushed down the covers so he could breathe, and settled back.

It was different this time. Not such a shock (and it had been shocking, a little). His hands were on her legs, moving them further apart, and she felt herself relax completely even as the little muscles in her stomach jumped in anticipation. Now that he knew where the zero-to-ninety switch was located he was more deliberate, refining his technique. But his breath came faster with each moan he drew from her.

She was getting close again when, abruptly, he pulled back. She heard herself whine in exquisite frustration, a noise she was quite sure no one had ever caused her to make before, and squirmed toward him, but he pulled back further. What was he at? She was doing everything _but _telling him straight out what she wanted, and that was the next thing she'd try—

He chuckled, more lustful than amused, lowered his head, and drew a line with his tongue, ever so light. Too light. She got it. "Oh, you bloody _tease_," she muttered, and he laughed again.

"D'you want me to stop teasing?" He kissed all around her, humming in contentment, full of himself. "Hmm?" Her breath caught as his tongue flicked at her clit and she thought _Really? He's not done this before? _

She did want him to stop teasing. She wanted him to make her come again and then fill her up, with his cock and with the power of bringing him the same pleasure he'd brought her; she wanted them kissing and collapsed in a tangle, panting into each other's necks, drifting off smiling and an "I love you" whispered into her hair the last thing she heard before going to sleep.

She also wanted him to keep going until she couldn't stand it anymore.

"Don't..." she breathed. "Don't stop."

He didn't. He stroked her with his tongue, still a bit clumsy but soft, and somehow the knowledge that he was holding back made it even more erotic. Sybil let her hand drift up to her breast, circling the nipple with her thumb. Her breath sped up into a pant again, and she could feel Tom's accelerate as well. He sucked on her clit—gently, so gently—and she made a keening noise, her breath going ragged…and then he started kissing her thighs.

The burst of sensation that had been building up drained away, subsiding into a tension that was as delicious as it was maddening. "_Ohhh,_" she groaned.

"Mmm," said Tom.

His fingers were inside her, his tongue. He chuckled at the small, increasingly desperate sounds she made as he brought her to the edge again, and then again, but she felt as though she was holding him in thrall as much as he was her. His eyes laughed but they smoldered too; after a while they weren't laughing anymore. It was his eyes, full of love and lust and promise, that finally did it. Sybil thought that if she had to wait any longer she would dissolve into mercury, the shining drops of her scattering in all directions.

"Please…" she murmured, unable to form any other words. "Oh please, Tom, I need…please—"

He let out a rough groan, almost a growl, as his mouth descended on her clit, his hands gripping her arse to bring her closer. When she came seconds later she almost died, it was so good. She cried out wildly and her hand flew out and landed in his hair and he was _burrowing _his face into her, moaning "Ah, fuck, Sybil, oh Jesus…"

She grabbed his shoulders and pulled up with a strength she hadn't known she had. As he sank into her she wrapped her legs around his body, grinding hard against him. Instead of dissipating the orgasm grew stronger, wave after wave of pleasure so strong it was almost pain; she needed more of it, more of him. The taste of herself on his lips was darkly exciting. "Harder," she gasped, and she could feel his moans as well as hear them, vibrating through his body as he came.

He drifted to a stop, his lips pulling soft and loose on her cheek, her shoulder. Eventually they lay still together, hands slipping over skin. "I love you," he whispered.

"I love you too." Her voice felt like silk coming out of her throat. She could lie here forever. Maybe they would.

"Holy fuck."

It sounded like he was talking to himself, but she murmured with a laugh, "Yeah."

After a moment he slipped to one side and propped his head up on his hand, so he could look down at her. "So why didn't you ever tell me you liked that?" His voice held no accusation, just mild curiosity, and a tinge of that self-satisfaction she'd seen on his face earlier.

She chuckled. _Why indeed._ "I didn't know myself."

His eyebrow twitched upward; now he was really surprised. "Is that right."

"Yep. No one's ever done that to me before." She considered. "At least, not like _that_."


	5. Chapter 5

_So I know y'all are waiting for the last chapter of A Real Education, but some of you were wanting Sybil's POV as all the drama unfolds. This chapter begins right after the phone conversation where Sybil tells Tom she's been offered a job that will keep her in Africa for three more years._

_Please forgive inaccuracies and liberties taken in my depictions of how NGOs work in Ghana._

* * *

She was shaking with anger when she rang off. The bloody _cheek _of him, questioning her motives. As much as calling her a tourist, when he knew very well what she was giving up to be here.

She knew she'd never be able to sleep, so she went for a walk through the dark town. She'd been told she shouldn't walk alone at night (in that, at least, Mampong was no different to London) but it felt safe enough. The electricity was on for once, people squatting outside of houses and shops in the harsh orangish light of the energy efficient bulbs, nodding as she passed. Besides, she wouldn't go far; she just needed to be moving. Walking fueled thought as much as lying down, but she'd hoped that going forward physically might offer her a mental way out of her problem.

It was a problem. She couldn't tell herself any longer that it wasn't, or that it would go away if she tried not to think about it.

She'd gone to Tom with good news—great news!—and he'd behaved like it was the end of the world. He hadn't even seemed to hear the most important bit, which was that with leave time spelled out in her employment agreement she'd be able to visit more often and at more predictable intervals (of course now she could go on leave whenever she wanted, theoretically, but she'd been given to understand that unless staffing needs were met she would not be welcomed back. And staffing needs were almost never met). What did he think? That she was on holiday? That she'd come back to Ann Arbor after a few months in Africa, to live on her trust fund and proofread his essays? He'd known she was leaving. He'd known what she wanted out of life. Just what the hell did he expect from her?

_This is not working, _she thought._ For either of us._

She kept hearing the sarcasm in his voice, like the flick of a whip. _You do love to feel virtuous...I think you love that more than you love me. _It had been a nasty shock to hear him belittle her, say things he knew would hurt her. What was worse was that it sounded as though he'd been holding them back for some time.

She arrived back at her lodging more agitated than when she'd left, and the first thing she saw was her mobile on the bed with a new text on it. Her ire flared up all over again. She wanted to leave it until morning but couldn't make herself. _I'm sorry if what I said pissed you off, love. I think we need to talk more about this. _"Love!" she scoffed aloud to her room. "Calls me _love_, in the same sentence as he says 'I'm sorry you were pissed off.' _Fucking _cheek!"

The next morning she and Abena went north for two days. The first night she barely slept, in spite of having had a full day of travel and work. Her wrath at Tom drained away, replaced with long thoughts about promises she had made to him, or promises he might have intuited, unspoken but nevertheless real. She thought about the difficulty of keeping such promises: even when two people vowed to love each other till death do them part, all too often they found it impossible to forsake all others. And "all others" did not necessarily refer to, say, a female driver with auburn hair and chrome-colored eyes.

The feeling of being pulled in two different directions was not new for Sybil, but it seemed more urgent now. This was the first time they'd actually fought about her being away, but she had a sinking feeling that it would not be the last. And what was it all for? Even if Tom's support never wavered again, Sybil knew how much he craved the everyday interaction he wasn't getting. Words that could be thrown away carelessly because there were so many of them. Touch. Sex. He didn't deserve an absentee girlfriend. Before too long this wouldn't be a relationship but a pen friendship, and he'd still feel duty bound to be faithful because that was who he was. It was different for Sybil: she had work, she had her ambition, she had fire in her belly. Tom did too, but he was still in the same life, the same town. It would only be natural for him to look around one day and wonder why he should continue to deprive himself.

_You could quit._

She hadn't asked anyone's advice—her situation felt too raw, too private—but she knew that Mary, relentlessly pragmatic Mary, would tell her not to rule anything out. So, whilst lying in her cot listening to Abena's gentle snores outside the mosquito net, she tried to follow the idea to its logical conclusion. It was theoretically possible for her to give up her position, go back to Ann Arbor, and live her life on the premise that being with Tom was her first priority. And what would she do? She hated the idea of more school, when there was so much work to be done right where she was. But what else was there, in a university town?

The rebel in her rose up. _You're going to give up your dream so you can stand by your bloody man?_

Obviously, that was what _he _wanted her to do. His cynicism about her work had surprised and disappointed her. _Shite job, indeed. _The work she did wasn't prestigious or lucrative, but it was important, not least to the people she helped. Even more so because they were the ones nobody cared about. She would have thought he'd be sensitive to that.

So: say she did go back. How long would it take for her to start resenting him?

What she feared most was throwing away such an important part of herself for love, only to be left with nothing. She'd rather keep her memories of their time together, bittersweet but intact and treasured. If she knew Tom at all, he would want the same thing.

The next day she even more of a mess, her mind half on her work. Abena said nothing that morning, though her eloquent sidewise glances told Sybil that her preoccupation had been noted. After lunch, during which Sybil had spoken hardly a word, she said, "Are you sick?"

"No," Sybil said, "I'm fine."

"You don't act like you're fine. Just 'cos you're getting a new job doesn't mean you can check out, girl." Abena smiled kindly, but her eyes were serious.

Sometime before the birds began to sing on Saturday, but the thick darkness had not yet begun to lift, Sybil made her decision. There was no joy in it, but there was relief. It was calming to know what needed to be done.

She felt righteous. She would be able to follow her calling without (much) guilt, and he would be free to find someone who could give him what he needed. She counted his inexperience as one more reason she was doing the right thing. It would be painful at first: even now she felt a sinking in her midsection, and it would get worse before it got better.

_But it will get better. For both of us._

She told herself this as she finally fell into a doze, as she choked down her breakfast, as they made the laborious journey back to Mampong. The closer they got to the moment of truth, the more severely she had to scold herself. _It _will _be the best thing. Don't bottle it now. _They came within range of a cell tower and three texts came in at once, all from Tom. At first she thought she should delete them unread, but then considered the fact that whatever was in them might fuel her resolve.

She was wrong. The first was conciliatory but still rather distant; reserve unraveled with the second. The third was the one that had her pressing her lips between her teeth until she was alone and could collapse in tears on her bed, longing a knife in her stomach.

_I'm sorry. I didn't mean what I said...I know this job is what you've been waiting for and I want you to take it. I just miss you so much, love._

She closed her eyes and deleted all three messages. Then she went outside and walked about for a bit, working up her nerve. Face to face was the only way, wrenching as that would be. She'd kept her iPhone turned off while she was traveling, and it still had a full charge. Today was the day: now she'd decided, it felt dishonest to keep him in the dark. And it would never get any easier.

-o-

For a solid minute, she stared at the blank screen on her mobile as though it would come to life again.

Finally she thumbed the phone asleep, set it down on the desk, and closed her eyes. She had to fold her hands to stop them shaking. She'd known it would be bad, but not _that _bad. She'd prepared a whole speech, done everything but write it down, but now she couldn't even remember what she'd said to him.

_It was the right decision._

So why did it feel like she was trying to convince herself?

_You could ring him right now. Take it back. _Except she couldn't. Everything she'd told him was true: they'd made their plans based on the assumption that there would be an eventual end to this situation, but Sybil hadn't a clue when that might be. She couldn't see a future where she would return to the States for anything more than visits. It wasn't fair on him, wasn't fair on either of them. Yet it took everything she had not to snatch up her mobile.

It was one thing to think that breaking with him was the best thing for both of them; quite another to actually do it. She'd blindsided him. That had been obvious as soon as the words were out of her mouth. God, his _face_. The thought had never even entered his mind, and that had been her first clue that she might be making a mistake.

To distract herself from the previous ten minutes replaying in her mind, she brought out her little store of memories from the last few months. Dr. Appiah, calling her into this very office to give her the good news about the job in Monrovia. He was almost sorry to tell her, he'd said, because it meant he'd lose the best aide he'd had in years. Shy, sweet five-year-old George from that village northeast of Axim, whose name she'd remembered because it was the one Mary had picked for a boy. He'd hugged her after she gave him his jabs and said he forgave her because she was smiley and pretty. All the others she'd been able to help to free from pain, from infirmity, sometimes even from death. In four months here, she hadn't had a single patient she'd not been able to help in some way. She didn't even try to convince herself that that was anything other than the most amazing luck, but it bolstered her a little.

Yet she kept seeing the shock on Tom's face. _You're not giving up? _Her stomach hurt, her head hurt. The ache grew stronger every minute she didn't pick up her mobile and call him and say _I didn't mean it. Forgive me._ But what could she do? She'd resent him if she went back. He'd resent her if she stayed. Either way, sooner or later things were bound to come to a sticky end.

There was a soft knock on the door of the clinic's tiny office. "Sybil?" It was Abena, who always seemed to speak in the strengthening cadence of a career nurse. "Could I borrow you a moment, please?" Abena had no idea what Sybil had just done. "I need help with intake. We've got a bit of a rush on our hands."

"Of course," Sybil called. "I won't be a moment."

_It's better this way,_ she told herself again. The pain she felt was the shock of a fresh wound, bright with blood and swimming with bacteria. Given proper treatment—isolation, rigorous cleansing—it would heal, and the scar would be too small to see unless you were looking for it.

-o-

Work did not stop. In the ten minutes the conversation had taken up (_I broke my boyfriend's heart during my tea break, _Sybil thought caustically) four patients had come in. A thirtyish man complaining of painful urination; two women with infected cuts; a toddler with a high fever. Another young woman was waiting until Sybil or Abena could come to her home to have a look at her grandfather, who was having trouble breathing and couldn't walk the three miles to the treatment center. This was the way things were: one had to keep going, and it did help the time go by.

The next morning Sybil awoke refreshed, surprised that she'd slept so soundly. Maybe she'd just been that exhausted, or maybe something in her was relieved to have the hard choice made and executed. That was the pattern for the next few days. Hard work during the day, dreamless sleep at night. Thinking about Tom as little as she possibly could, which was still too much.

She hadn't factored in how bloody much she would miss him. Since she'd been here it had seemed like they could never get enough interaction, but now that there was none at all she would have been happy just to hear his voice. She pushed down the urge to ring him: it would only tempt her to go back on her decision (_the right decision_, still her nightly mantra) and worse, it would stir him up. He'd be confused as to her intentions, it would make him think she was messing him about. But it was a wrench to go through this, one of the hardest things she'd ever done, without the person she'd counted on for support for so long.

When she trusted herself to stay composed, she rang Mary and told her. "Oh, darling, I'm so sorry," Mary said, and just like that Sybil's cool was gone: she blubbed on the phone for ten minutes, and Mary was lovely and let her. Of course she canceled it out by saying, once Sybil had calmed down, "But we all could have told you it wasn't going to work, with you being so far apart for so long."

"So it's my fault, then, is it?" She should have expected this. Her family all thought she'd been mad to come here.

"I didn't say that," Mary said soothingly. "It does sound like Tom was rather a git about the job. And I really couldn't see you being with someone who didn't support your harebrained ideas."

"I thought he did support my harebrained ideas." Sybil sniffled.

Mary cleared her throat delicately. "This will sound awfully callous, darling, but I suppose it's best that you found out the truth before it was too late."

What was the truth? Sybil had difficulty sorting it out from the narrative she'd tried to create in her head over the past few days, that Tom had only been indulging her. That he'd freaked out because he hadn't realized before that she was serious; he'd thought she would get her fill of hardship and come back quickly. What troubled her most was the possibility that there was truth in the things he'd said. Maybe she really was a dilettante, a great lady swooping in to save the wretched. Maybe the important part of herself she'd thrown away was him.

"I don't know what's best anymore," she said. "But all we can do is move forward. Right?"

-o-

She concluded that it didn't matter if he'd been right about her motives for coming to Africa. You couldn't always control your intention, but you could control your actions. Through her actions she would prove the lie in his words, even if he never knew it.

-ooo-

She moved to Monrovia and in the thick of the new job, the new living situation and new people and new life, she barely had time to feed herself and sleep, let alone brood. It seemed as though she looked up and six months had gone by. And soon after that, things went to a very different kind of hell.


	6. Chapter 6

December 2014

When Sybil got home, she showered off the eighteen hour journey from Monrovia to Downton Abbey, crawled into bed, and slept for three days.

She got up to use the toilet, to shuffle to the kitchen every twelve hours or so and drink a cup of tea, soft-boil herself an egg and eat a banana in small efficient bites. Nobody was ever down there, and she met no one on the stairs. Occasionally she would hear voices from a few rooms away, but she didn't seek them out.

On the morning of the fourth day, she awoke feeling like some semblance of a human being. She glanced at the clock on the mantel, then lay back and did a rough calculation in her head: eighty hours she'd slept, off and on. It was a fraction of the sleep she'd lacked in the past year and a half, but for the first time in a long time, she could think.

Well, fuck _that._

She pushed herself up out of bed and into the shower, turning the water so hot it made her skin pink and filled the bathroom with billowing steam. She stayed until the water grew lukewarm; then she twisted the hot water tap all the way off and grimaced under the icy spray for a further five minutes.

She got out, dressed, finger combed her hair, and checked her smile in the mirror. Then she went down to breakfast with her parents.

-o-

Mama, of course, had met her when she arrived at the house (even though it'd been past midnight when the car service dropped her off, even though she'd said not to wait up). Sybil had fended off sandwiches and tea, allowed herself to be embraced and a cursory inspection to take place. But breakfast on the fourth day was the first time she'd seen her father in a year and a half.

He rose when she came into the room, though she couldn't tell whether it was to greet her or because Mama had. After Mama kissed her good morning, with rather more than the usual amount of hair-smoothing and shoulder-patting, Sybil and her father faced each other. The heat of leftover animosity rose shimmering between them but faded quickly, like the tongues of flame from burning paper when there is no more enduring fuel.

Sybil smiled awkwardly. "Hello, Papa."

His face relaxed, lost a bit of its watchful look. "Hello, darling." He leaned forward to kiss her cheek, then changed his mind and pulled her into a hug. She stiffened, more in surprise than revulsion, but relaxed into it a half second later, letting her cheek rest against the front of his jumper. A wave of emotion rose inside her and her eyes prickled with tears. "I'm glad you're home. We've been so worried."

She pulled back, her lips still stretched into a smile shape. "There was no need," she said, and he raised an eyebrow. "Really, we had protocols in place. Safe as houses." Which was not strictly true, at least the bit about safety, but they didn't need to know everything.

Sybil went to the sideboard to serve herself while her parents returned to the table. "You'll have to tell us all about Africa once you've had the chance to settle in," Mama said, as though the past eighteen months had been a holiday. Facing the wall, Sybil rolled her eyes.

"I will," she promised. She'd have to perfect the edited version. She sat down in her old place, wishing Mary or Edith were here to take some of the heat off her. They would visit, of course, but they'd wanted to give her a chance to rest before they descended with their children.

"How was your flight?" Papa asked.

"Long but uneventful." She forked some kedgeree into her mouth and chewed slowly. Her appetite wasn't what it had been. Papa looked different, she noted. His ordeal had obviously aged him, or maybe it was just the passage of time. Yet he seemed mentally sharper, not as preoccupied. _Of course,_ said the old cynical voice in Sybil's head. _He hasn't got a mistress to think about._

"What do you think you'll do now?" It was the same question he'd been stuck on before, but he sounded genuinely curious rather than judgmental.

"Darling, you should let Sybil at least have one real meal at home before you start giving her the third degree," Mama said, and Sybil raised her eyebrows a fraction and cut her eyes to her father, who smiled at Mama fondly. The second honeymoon was still going strong, then. Oddly, this made her feel better; it hadn't done before she'd left for Accra. Then she'd still been disgusted with her father, incredulous at Mama's willingness to excuse his behavior. But now she knew there were much worse things to be dealing with, and she'd seen people risk death gladly to care for those they loved. In the face of that, a wife taking back her straying husband was hardly beyond comprehension.

-ooo-

She had no immediate plans. Mama had told her she was welcome to stay at Downton as long as she liked, and Sybil decided that she would assess her situation more fully after the new year. Before that there was Christmas, there was the family arriving, there was Granny, who was uncharacteristically mum about what could easily be termed Sybil's failure (though it would only be a failure if she gave up, which she was a long way from doing). "We missed you last Christmas, dear" was the only allusion she made to Sybil's career.

Everyone, Sybil noted, was treating her rather more gently than usual, even as they tried to behave as though she had not changed. Thank goodness for Isobel. "There's no shame in having a bit of a rest, you know," she told Sybil in a quiet corner, before The Game got started on Christmas night. "Even if you don't think you feel it at the time, it takes a toll, doesn't it?" It helped to hear it from someone who had nursed, who'd been in some version of Sybil's shoes.

"It does," Sybil admitted. "And losing so many, so quickly—" She swallowed hard, fighting back tears. Her emotions were so much closer to the surface these days.

Isobel's kind face creased in empathy. "I can only imagine how traumatic that must have been."

Sybil sniffled, gaining control. "It was nothing compared to what my patients went through."

"Still." Isobel put both hands on her shoulders, almost a hug. "Just remember: you're a human being, not a machine."

She'd had trouble with the children at first. Those beautiful, blooming babies; it was hard to look at them without seeing the ones whose fevers hadn't just been from teething. But within a few days she'd become quite their favorite auntie. Marigold especially liked her and showed it in her shy way, crawling into her lap whenever she was in the room and bringing her small treasures: a curl of pink ribbon salvaged from a Christmas present, a Peppa Pig figurine. Sybil would have offered to baby-sit them during the Servants' Ball if Mary hadn't already engaged a nanny for New Year's Eve. Certainly whiling away the evening reading picture books sounded more pleasant than pretending she didn't notice the curious glances of her parents' friends all night. Mama had told her that she was perfectly welcome to miss the ball if she felt it would be too much, but Sybil both bristled at the choice of words (Sybil Crawley, defeated by a social function? Not likely) and yielded to the unspoken invocation of her duty. After being away so long, the least she could do was show up to her parents' party. Larry Grey, Mama was sure to inform her, had not been invited.

What she hadn't anticipated, though she should have done, was people's ignorance about Ebola and the situation in west Africa. The little British coverage she'd seen of the pandemic had stressed that the disease wasn't spread through casual contact, but it was almost comical to see the lengths to which some of the guests went to avoid coming too close. An old friend of her mother's embraced Mary and Edith before stopping short and patting Sybil's shoulder with the tips of her fingers. She could count on one hand the number of times she was asked to dance. _I've been in England for an entire incubation period, _she said to them inside her head._ If I were going to get ill, I would have done by now._

The ones who were brave enough to speak with her seemed to think that Monrovia had been something akin to a war zone. "How did you live? Wasn't it terribly dangerous?" asked Dorothea Twickenham, who didn't seem to believe Sybil when she said she'd had a lodging and bought her food in the market like everyone else. "Well, I think it's very noble of you, risking your life for those poor people," the woman concluded, with a self-satisfied air at her own tolerance.

There was also the constant weight of the last Servants' Ball she'd attended and the news they'd got early the next morning. Linda, Patrick's mother, was there in a wheelchair, scowling and clutching a gin and tonic; when Sybil went up to say hello she turned her chair around and flounced away, apparently nervous of contagion. And Sybil stayed well away from the library. Too many ghosts there tonight.

When the party was over she collapsed on her back on top of her bed, too tired to undress. It was the most difficult night she'd had since she'd arrived.

-ooo-

When Mary, Matthew and George left Downton, Sybil rode with them to Manchester for a visit. She bonded with George, who still hadn't discovered tantrums at almost thirteen months old and returned every glance with a heart-splitting smile. In the daytime the nanny came in and Sybil watched cricket with Matthew or went to the shops with Mary, trips that resulted in many carrier bags for Mary and few for Sybil. They came back and played with George and put him to bed and had dinner and drank wine and talked. Matthew went to bed, having work in the morning, and Sybil and Mary stayed up and talked more, far into the night.

One night they'd just opened a third bottle and were sitting at the dining room table and Mary asked, "Do you ever hear from Tom?"

The name sent a jolt of adrenaline through Sybil. Suddenly she didn't know where to look. She'd thought of him since she came back, of course, in a sideways sort of way. She just hadn't expected that she'd have to talk about him. "I don't, no."

"Matthew's kept in touch, I think."

Sybil could feel Mary's eyes on her, though she kept hers on her glass, swirling it. "Oh?" The less she said, the sooner this would be over, though there was a part of her that didn't want it to be. It might feel good, she thought, to finally be able to let some of it out.

"Just emails here and there, and they're still friends on Facebook," Mary said. The first time Sybil had logged in, weeks after the breakup, she'd noted Tom's absence from her friends list immediately. "I think Matthew sent him a card at Christmas."

A sudden wild thought. "Did he tell him—"

"It was just a note and a photo of George," Mary said. "He didn't say anything about you being back."

"Oh." Why did she feel disappointed? "No, I haven't heard from him since...since we ended things." Why would she? He probably hated her as much as he did his other ex. She took a drink of her wine and shrugged, willing her heartbeat to slow down. "So much has happened since all that."

"Of course it has." Mary warmed with the dismissal of one uncomfortable topic, but looked properly solemn as she introduced another. "Darling, you've been through so much. I can't even imagine."

"It's nothing compared to what people are still going through over there." By now, Sybil was heartily sick of being told what an ordeal she'd had. "I have to go back, Mary." She pushed her glass a few inches away and looked up, checking her sister for signs of dissent, but Mary had perfected her poker face when she was still in nappies. She merely raised her eyebrows. "Maybe not right away, but I have to find a way to do _something._"

"But what? Surely you don't want to wade right back into the thick of it."

_That's exactly what I want._ She'd only left Monrovia because Dr. Banerjee had made her, and because he'd said the right things to make her see the sense in it. She could have found work with a more desperate or less scrupulous organization, but she wouldn't be able to live with herself if her stubbornness caused someone's death.

Yet distance had given her perspective, and she was no longer certain that wading right back in was the best thing she could do. She could feel the place and its people calling her back, but she also remembered something else Dr. Banerjee had said: _You'd make an excellent doctor, Miss Crawley. You've got the intelligence and the grit; all you seem to be lacking is the sense to know when you need a break. _Then he'd smiled tiredly and said that he hoped she'd be back in six months.

"Do you know," Mary said, breaking into her thoughts, "We're losing Downton. Papa's not sure yet what's to be done with it, but it's only a matter of time, and not much of that."

"Oh." The news stunned Sybil more than it should have done. "I'm sorry," she said. "I know what it means to you."

Mary gave a sad smile. "It really doesn't mean much to _you_, does it?"

"Of course it does. It's my home." It was and it wasn't. "I'll miss it terribly, but that doesn't mean getting rid of it can't be a good thing in the end, especially for you and Matthew. All that upkeep would have been a terrible burden." Sybil refrained from mentioning that nobody needed a fifty-bedroom house anymore. If they ever had.

"That's what Matthew says. Though I know he's disappointed as well. No matter what he might say, he is fond of the old pile."

"Not like you, though."

"No, not like me." Mary took a glum swallow of her wine. "I hope one day I can come round to seeing it your way."

-ooo-

Sybil went back to Downton with eyes newly opened to the hushed conversations between her father and Carson, the signs of disrepair that had appeared since she was last home. Would the house be sold and restored, turned into a luxury hotel or a boarding school? Would it be turned over to the National Trust, to become a monument to a long-dead way of life? Or would it be pulled down? It was rather sad to think of her family legacy coming to such an abrupt and disappointing conclusion, but mostly for Mary's sake (and for Papa's). In the end it was just a house.

Nevertheless, she wandered the upper floors, peering into the cold, crumbling rooms. She took long walks outdoors, slogging through snow or mud in her wellington boots. Slowly she realized that these excursions were her farewell to Downton, and to England. A part of her had known since she arrived in the country that she wouldn't stay. England would always be _home, _the place she'd come from, but she'd already decided that her fate lay elsewhere. Maybe Liberia; maybe not. She envied her past self, the girl who'd seen her path laid out so clearly. Now she had no idea which way to go.

-o-

Her forgiveness of Papa had happened well before they'd been reunited, she realized. He'd struck his marriage a grievous blow, but he seemed completely reformed and devoted to Mama, as Mama was to him. The past was a graveyard, Sybil thought; her parents were looking to the future, and so must she. People could be here one day and gone the next, and you'd only be hurting yourself by holding a grudge.

With unhealed hurts on her mind, it was natural that she should think of Tom. She hadn't allowed herself much reminiscence during her time in Africa. If her thoughts had drifted too far in that direction, she'd quickly pulled them onto another track. But now she couldn't stop remembering Tom laughing, one eye crinkled up. Tom burning toast and swearing. Tom with his half-sardonic, half-earnest smile, listening to her talk about her dreams. Tom in bed, his low laugh and warm skin and his eagerness.

And the rest of it. The defeat underlying the anger in his voice when she'd told him she'd be away another three years. He'd known all along that he'd lose if he tried to compete with her work; she'd never let him forget it, had she? And when he'd had the temerity to get angry about it, what had she done? Cut him loose, abruptly and with hardly any explanation, _a clean break_ she'd thought at the time, not knowing that a love like theirs never broke without leaving sharp points.

_Fuck your sorry._ He must hate her so much. She deserved it. She'd known full well that he'd had his heart broken before, and then she'd gone right ahead and broken it again. It was that guilt that kept her from reaching out, that and the fact that she might be back in Monrovia by summer. The thought was a relief and a burden.

Early in February a string of winter storms kept her indoors for days. She tried to read, but between the wind moaning in the eaves and the rising babble in her own head it was difficult to concentrate. She lay on her bed listening to podcasts about television shows she had never watched, and when she couldn't stand that any longer she prowled the house. One afternoon, she found herself in the bachelors' corridor. Though she'd been everywhere else—even the attics, testing the floor with each step—her travels had not yet brought her here. In an oblique way she knew this had been intentional. Now, though, she went straight to a certain door and stopped outside, staring at its smooth-painted surface.

"It's only a room," she whispered to herself, and tried it. It opened.

There was no smell of damp in the air here like upstairs; the last time someone had slept here was the Servants' Ball, but Mrs. Hughes and her hirelings cleaned what she called the "active" rooms on a rotating schedule. Yet there was an aura of disuse, the coverlet pulled so tight over the bed that it gave the appearance of something solid, crimson velvet over stone. When Sybil perched on the edge, however, it sank in with a faint groan of the springs.

There'd probably been plenty of guests in here since the Christmas before last. Her parents entertained often, and had hardly paused during their brief separation. Still, when she lay down and turned her face into the pillow, she had a wave of remembrance so strong that she fancied she could smell his scent, and suddenly she was crying. She hadn't before, much; there hadn't been time. And since she came back here she'd felt mostly numb, with an edge of mild irritability. Now everything seemed to be coming out at once. It wasn't just Tom. It was exhaustion, stress, a year and a half's grief and frustration that she'd pushed down because she was people's last hope and she needed to embody order and safety for them. They needed to be told that everything would be fine by somebody who looked as though she believed it, and hers was the last face so many of them saw.

She wanted Tom; she wanted him so badly. She'd be able to tell him about it, in the way that she could never tell her parents and she hadn't quite been able to convey to Mary, but most of all she wanted him to hold her and say, _I understand why you had to go._ No one else did, but he had, even in the end. She'd been the one who'd given up. Regret twisted inside her, lacerating, and she couldn't stop crying.

"Oh, God, please," she moaned; she wasn't praying, at least not in the sense of addressing any specific entity. She just wanted the pain to end. It was worse than working in the pandemic. Then at least there'd been something to _do_. Now she was stuck here, idle, with her useless repentance.

"Lady Sybil?" Carson stood in the doorway. Sybil sat up and scrubbed at her cheeks with her hands, sniffling and feeling caught out. He took a half step back, plainly horrified at having interrupted a display of emotion. "Oh. I'm terribly sorry. Only I saw the door was open, and—"

"No, I shouldn't have been in here," she said, standing. "I'm sorry, I've made a mess of the bed." She tried to straighten the coverlet, and Carson came into the room to help her.

"Never you mind that," he said, and there was something so grandfatherly in it: his stern, worried eyebrows, that steadfast bass voice. It brought the tears back and she had to turn away and press her eyes shut with her fingertips. "Lady Sybil? Are you all right?"

"Quite all right," she said, and she was sobbing again.

Strong hands took her by the shoulders, and Carson turned her gently and drew her in. "There now, Lady Sybil," he rumbled, and she pressed her cheek to the front of a jumper that smelt comfortingly of aftershave. She'd never been his favorite like Mary had, but he'd always been kind to her. "We've all been a bit rattled by the news."

_What news?_ she almost asked, but then realized that of course he was talking about Downton. How oblivious she'd been; he and Mrs. Hughes must be devastated. She pulled back to look at him. "How are you bearing up?"

His face barely moved apart from a slight tightening around the mouth as he handed her his handkerchief (of course he carried a handkerchief). He didn't even allow himself a sigh. "We've been through many things," he intoned, "And we shall get through this." He sounded as though he were quoting someone, his wife perhaps.

"What will you do?"

"Oh, don't worry about me, Lady Sybil. It's high time I went into retirement."

That made her laugh. "I can't quite imagine you playing golf, Carson."

"Golf!" He looked truly scandalized. "As if I'd be caught dead in plaid trousers. The very idea." The outrage seemed to have raised his spirits, which in turn raised Sybil's. "Feeling better?" He took back his handkerchief and stepped back, safely out of range of any further deluge of sentiment.

"Yes, much. Thank you."

He regarded her solemnly. "Lady Sybil, you know that you'll always have a home to come to."

_No matter how far I roam._ It made her feel more stifled than safe, but she smiled and thanked him again before making her way back to her own room. She sat near the window and watched the storm, a grey veil of half-twilight at midafternoon. It matched her mood.

Home wasn't a house, wasn't walls and floors and wood and stone. Home was the people you loved._ A person_. And she'd been the one to lock herself out.


	7. Chapter 7

_Thanks so much to everyone who has reviewed! One more chapter after this, I think, and one more in _ARE_. I'm in as much denial as you that this story is ending!_

* * *

She had never seriously considered not going back to Liberia. _A rest,_ Dr. Banerjee had said. _Take continuing professional development and call it a sabbatical if you like, but it's what you need. _So she was looking up short courses at York. At least, that was what she'd gone to the website to do, but she'd found herself in the postgraduate degree programs section instead. After that she found a medical student forum and got lost in that for almost two hours.

For years all she'd wanted was to get started; once she'd got started, all she'd wanted was to keep working. She couldn't deny that the idea still attracted her. In the spring she could return to Monrovia, throw herself right back into it. Forget everything else. Sybil was not particularly religious, and even if she'd been inclined toward the belief that everything happened for a reason, her months treating Ebola patients would have cured her of that. Yet it felt foolish to mark time until she could go back to what she'd been doing before; she shouldn't let this enforced hiatus go to waste. Hands were still needed in west Africa, but the news said the tide was turning, the numbers of new cases down every day. Soon the focus must be on the future, on prevention, making sure outbreaks did not become epidemics. And for that, minds were needed more than hands.

By the time Sybil looked up from her laptop, tummy rumbling and the sky having inexplicably darkened outside her window, she knew that she wanted hers to be one of those minds.

-o-

Over the next few days, she did research and began to make plans, though she confided her new ambition to no one yet. She quickly determined that, with her American bachelor's degree, she'd be more likely to get into medical school in the States. Accordingly, she focused on the best schools there that might accept her. The list included the University of Michigan.

_Of course I can't go _there_,_ she thought at first, but why not? She knew the city and had friends there. It was a top ranked program. And Tom, well…people ended relationships all the time and kept living in the same towns. Surely she and Tom could share Ann Arbor without bumping into each other too often.

She'd have to tell him she was coming, of course, but that could be accomplished in an email: _Been a long time! Hope you're doing well, don't freak out if you see me in Trader Joe's. _She couldn't stop that smoke signal of hope rising within her, the acrid ache in her chest, but she had to get into U of M before she could even worry about any of that. Probably she'd end up at UCLA and it would never even come up. She tried very hard to find that thought comforting.

-ooo-

Near the end of February, Matthew, Mary and George came to Downton again. Their visit had a rather practical purpose: Matthew was working in London for the next two weeks, Mary planned to go with him, and it was a perfect opportunity for George to have a nice long visit with his grandparents (with the nanny in tow, of course).

"You should come with us," Mary told Sybil.

She was doubtful. "When was the last time you and Matthew had time alone together?"

Mary laughed. "Matthew's going to be working twelve hour days. But if you're really worried, you can stay with Edith and Marigold, if you can stand the mess and the noise." That sounded rather nice, Sybil thought. She rang Edith to let her know she was coming; then she, Matthew and Mary went to the Grantham Arms for dinner.

Mary woke up vomiting in the middle of the night and was still at it, off and on, at nine the next morning when they'd planned to leave. "It was the prawns in the pub, I think," she told Sybil from her bed, where she was reclined in a sort of pretzel position that she claimed kept the nausea from being too severe. Matthew didn't want to leave her, but he had a dinner meeting that night and Mary would obviously be in no shape to travel in time. "I'll take the train up when I'm recovered, darling," she said, waving him off. "We've been through this before, though for a much nicer reason." She smiled weakly. "Between Carson and Mama, I'll be well looked after here." To Sybil she said, "Have a good time, and if Edith's complaining gets to be too much you can always come back to Grantham House."

"I wonder if I should cancel my meeting," Matthew said before they were out of the drive. He glanced in the rearview and Sybil glanced round to watch Downton receding behind them. She still couldn't quite get her mind around the possibility that it might be gone in the next few years.

"Mary'd probably skin you alive, but go right ahead," she said, turning back to the front.

Matthew sighed. "I'm sure you're right."

They bought coffees on the road and became more talkative as the day rose around them. Sybil made the mistake of asking about the case Matthew was working on, and was treated to a twenty-minute explication of libel law and the myriad ways the British press tried to circumvent it.

"I suppose you stepped in on Papa's behalf, when all that was going on," Sybil said.

Matthew frowned through the windscreen. "I didn't, actually. Ended up referring him to a colleague. I told him it was because the optics of having his son-in-law represent him weren't good, but I suppose I just didn't feel quite right about it." He took a quick sideways glance at Sybil and, seeing that she wasn't angry, went on. "I'm not normally such a moralist in my professional life, I've represented plenty of adulterous wankers."

"Just not any you were related to by marriage."

He couldn't cover his smirk. "No."

"Since I've been back, though, I've noticed he seems to have…" She trailed off, looking for the word.

"Turned over a new leaf?"

"He and my mother do seem to love each other," she said, "though I suppose I thought that before."

"Sometimes people do awful things to people they love, without realizing how much it will hurt them."

_Oh, they do. They do._ "They might think at the time that it's the best thing," Sybil blurted.

"Er...having an affair?"

Sybil barely heard him. "Maybe they honestly believe they've got the other person's best interests at heart. Even though underneath, they're probably just doing what they want to, but they do feel sorry for it later."

Another sideways glance, this one a touch longer. "Well, er…" Matthew cleared his throat. "I can't know what was going through Robert's mind. But I do think that in this case, Cora giving him a second chance worked out for the best all round."

Sybil almost decided to keep silent, but then went for it. "Mary said you speak to Tom sometimes."

Matthew didn't seem surprised by the turn of the conversation. "I wouldn't say speak. We email occasionally, Facebook…but yes. I am in contact with him." He glanced over, then back to the road. "He's doing fine."

It wasn't clear what that meant; a simple statement of fact, or a warning? _Don't push in where you're not wanted. _She hadn't realized she'd been seriously thinking about getting in touch with Tom until that moment. "I'm glad," she said faintly.

"Are you?"

He'd said it in a mild tone, but it put Sybil's back up. "What the hell does that mean?"

Matthew lifted one hand off the wheel, splayed in a _Now don't let's get upset_ gesture. "I didn't mean it like that. Only...we were talking about second chances."

She felt like she couldn't get enough air. She pinched the bridge of her nose, massaged her forehead with her fingertips, and asked, "Does he hate me?"

"He doesn't speak about you."

That was somehow worse: far from cursing her name, he had almost forgotten it. She squeezed her eyes shut _don't cry don't cry don't cry._

"But like I said, he and I don't exactly talk our hearts out. And if relationship status and photos on Facebook are any indication, he hasn't had a girlfriend since you."

That swung her back over into another kind of emotional turmoil, the guilty kind. "I wish he knew how sorry I am," she said.

Matthew's smile was sardonic, but not unkind. "And that's all you wish, is it?"

Giving a bleak chuckle, she shook her head. "No."

"Well, it'd be pretty crap of you to try and reel him back in if you're just going to skip off to Africa again in six months' time."

"I know."

They rode a few minutes in silence, Sybil gazing at the cows in the fields, contentedly cropping grass, without an idea in their heads of the slaughterhouse. Would she rather be like them, in blissful ignorance of her fate, never expecting anything better or worse out of life than what she had?

"Sybil," Matthew blurted, "If you like, I could try and see if—"

"I'm going to go to medical school," she interrupted.

Matthew's surprise filled the car. "That's wonderful," he said after a minute. "Mary will be relieved."

"I'll still work in Africa, once I've finished everything. Probably not all the time, though." She felt the blood singing in her temples. "I'm considering applying to the University of Michigan. Do you think there's any reason I shouldn't? Going on what you know."

"Why you shouldn't live there again? No reason I know of. But Sybil…" Matthew looked a little pained. "I wouldn't make a decision based on something that might not happen. I'd hate for you to be disappointed."

She regarded him gravely, almost sure he couldn't see the crumbling-away feeling that gave her. "I won't be," she said.

-o-

She still waffled on whether she ought to get in touch with Tom until three nights later, when Edith got a babysitter for Marigold so the two of them could go out. "Not late, mind," Edith warned. "She'll be up at the crack of dawn, and I _don't _want to deal with that with a hangover."

Dinner washed down with a moderate amount of alcohol was more Sybil's speed these days anyway. Edith sighed contentedly once they were ensconced at a table in her pre-motherhood favorite restaurant, an Asian fusion place that served cocktails garnished with organic herbs. "It's lovely to do this once in a while without having to pick up dropped crayons every minute."

"I'm sure," said Sybil. "I have to say, though, Ede, motherhood looks wonderful on you."

"I wish!" Edith laughed and swiped at a stray curl; it was true that her personal style was a bit more _au naturel_ these days. "I'm surprised I made it out the door without having to mop something off my clothes."

"But you've done a smashing job so far. Marigold's healthy and happy, the two of you are close as can be, your career's taking off…"

"Well, thanks for saying so. Though I do wonder sometimes how much easier this might be if I had help." Judging by the faraway look in her eye, Edith was not referring to nannies.

"Michael still isn't involved?"

Edith's face twisted a little. "Not in the slightest. Bastard." She looked as though she'd like to spit on the floor.

"What are you going to tell Marigold about him?"

"I don't know, I honestly don't." She caught Sybil's eye. "I mean, of course I'm not going to badmouth him. But there's no good way to tell your child that her dad doesn't even care enough to meet her." She blinked rapidly and dabbed at her eyes with her napkin. "Sorry, this was meant to be our fun night out, wasn't it."

Sybil gave her shoulder a squeeze, which was about the most physical contact Edith would put up with. "It's all right. And Marigold might not have a father, but she does have a mother who cares very much. And grandparents, and two aunts, and an uncle."

Edith gave her a watery smile and dug in her handbag for a tissue. "Do you know what I really regret? I wish I'd fought harder for Anthony. I thought at the time I had done, but now I see I gave up much too easily. We were in love, you know. All everyone could see was how much older he was, but we got on like a house on fire." She blew her nose.

"You could still get in touch with him. He never married again, did he?"

Edith shrugged. "It's too late now. I've got Marigold, and so much time has gone by...I doubt he even thinks of me anymore."

"I'm sure that isn't true." Sybil took a swallow of her drink and wondered if Tom ever thought of her. She wished she was getting drunk tonight, drunk enough to text him. No, that was stupid. But she would write to him, she decided. Just because Edith had resigned herself to living with her great regret didn't mean Sybil had to.

-o-

Gwen, ever the pessimist, thought writing Tom was a terrible idea.

"I'd've thought you'd have got over him by now," she yelled, over the bowel-twisting burble of dubstep in one of the awful nightclubs she'd frequented back when she'd been between girlfriends. She'd just moved in with a woman she'd been seeing for almost a year and Sybil would have been happy to meet them in their (adorably domestic, by all appearances) milieu, but Gwen seemed to think it was her duty to show Sybil a good time.

It made conversation rather difficult. "Not really," Sybil yelled back.

"Are you sure it's not just 'cos you're bored, being home with nothing to do?"

Sybil gave her a look.

"OK, OK," Gwen said. "But he was really pissed off with you, yeah? What makes you think he'd enjoy hearing from you now?"

"Nothing!" Sybil shouted. "Absolutely nothing."

Now Gwen was the one to give Sybil a look.

"It's my duty as your friend," she said, "to tell you that it's probably going to end in disaster. But you already know that, don't you?"

Sybil gave a glum nod. "I haven't got the right to expect any better. I finished with him, after all."

Gwen frowned. "But you didn't want to, if I remember right. Look, Syb, I'm sorry if anything I said back then, you know, influenced you. I really thought you'd be better off without the baggage."

"It wasn't you," Sybil said. She wanted to say more, tell Gwen how sure she'd been that she was hurting Tom more by staying with him—ostensibly with him—than by leaving him. How she'd believed that they'd both get over the breakup, since she'd always got over them before. But it was too loud and it would only be empty justification anyway, so she just shrugged and said, "I don't know what I was thinking."

Gwen eyed her sympathetically. "Well, whatever happens, I'll always be here for you to moan to."

"Thanks," Sybil said dryly, and downed the rest of her drink.

-o-

While she was in London, she had her hair cut shorter—much shorter—and colored back to its natural brunette. For days afterward she walked around shaking her head like a horse, feeling giddy with the lightness.

-o-

She couldn't even begin an email to him. _Dear Tom,_ she'd type, then delete it and write just _Tom,_ then go back to how she'd had it. Then she'd close the browser window. She never got any further.

Back in Downton, she lay in bed at night composing missives to him in her head. _Dear Tom, I think about you all the time. I was wrong. Please give me another chance. I want you. I love you._ In the morning the words withered under her fingertips.

Maybe she could ring him. But the horror that uncurled inside her at the thought of his silence on the other end of the line was too much.

Perhaps a letter. A sheet of stationery she could run her fingers over, allow her tears to fall on, send through the post. He would touch it, smell it. Crumple it in his hands. Tear it in half unopened.

But maybe not. She'd write it, post it, and try to forget (ha!) about it. If no answer came, she could tell herself it'd got lost. One night she texted Matthew with a pounding heart: _Could I have Tom's address, please? _She expected he'd ask why, or remind her not to do anything unkind, but he simply replied with the information. Matthew had always trusted her judgment; it was one of the reasons she liked him so much. Writing longhand, however, posed the same problem as email.

_I won't give up,_ she thought. Love letters went on stringing themselves together in her head, but they never made it to paper or screen, no matter how many times she tried to write them.

-o-

She'd narrowed down the list of medical schools to six. She had no doubt she'd get into at least half of them. In the spring was when she'd need to make her applications; she'd hear back the following autumn, and enroll the autumn after that. She could easily apply from overseas, but she felt an urge to visit the schools, to walk the campuses and get a feel for the environment where she would spend four more years. She planned a meandering trip, spending several days in each city. Why not? It wasn't as if she had anything else to do.

Each city, that was, except the one she already knew. Going to Ann Arbor felt too dangerous, the hurt still too raw. Of course, if she were accepted she'd have to get over it...which was why she half hoped she wouldn't get in.

But only half.

-ooo-

April

She flew to New York and took shorter hops between Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Chicago. Most of the schools she'd chosen to apply to were in major cities: they attracted her, the anonymity of them. Next she'd fly cross-country to Los Angeles, a world apart from the old stone metropolises of the east and middle west. LA seemed bright and carefree, a place full of people escaping their pasts in one way or another. Escaping the past sounded just great.

On her first morning in Chicago she kept her appointment with the advisor at Pritzker, who was practically wriggling in his seat with excitement to have someone who'd been through the Ebola epidemic. "You should definitely, definitely apply," he kept saying. Somehow, Sybil didn't feel as encouraged as she should have done.

After that she was at a loose end. She had four and a half more days in the city: plenty of time for sightseeing and shopping (she'd promised George and Marigold presents from every place she went, because she was their auntie and she could spoil them). Or she could go back to her hotel and take a nap.

She took a taxi up to the Loop and walked around until her feet hurt; then she flopped down on a bench and watched people walking by. At this hour it was mainly tourists, walking slowly and peering into the maps on their mobiles, stopping in the middle of the pavement to take selfies with the skyscraper that had once been the world's tallest, the one Sybil couldn't remember the new name of. Everyone surrounded by their families. Sybil was the only one alone, adrift; the anonymity that had been a cloak before, now left her feeling exposed.

_I could be in Ann Arbor in four hours._

She could just go and speak to an academic advisor. Maybe look up some of her old friends who still lived in town; one of them would probably put her up for the night. It would be nice to see a friendly face. And if they happened to go out and bump into Tom…

She thought of the text from Matthew still in her mobile, which she hardly needed because she'd memorized the address it contained. She still remembered Ann Arbor well enough that she could visualize the nearest intersection. _Don't lie to yourself. If you go there, you're going to go and see him._

The question was, could she deal with the possibility that he wouldn't want to see her? That he hated her as much as she deserved, or that he'd moved on. Matthew had said he didn't _think _Tom was seeing anyone, but there was always the chance he was wrong. Sybil could think of few things more humiliating than knocking on Tom's door and coming face to face with her replacement.

But nothing could be worse than not knowing.

-o-

She spent the rest of the day and most of the night trying to convince herself to at least wait until she knew whether she'd got into U of M. But there was a sense of urgency driving her, telling her that autumn might be too late.

When she woke up late the next morning, she downed a double shot of espresso, rented a car, and got on the road.


	8. Chapter 8

_AN: Thanks so much!_

* * *

Sybil had done many difficult things in her life, most of them in the last two years. She'd done them stoically and as well as she could, because in most cases she'd felt as though she had no choice.

But now she did have a choice. No one would die if, having driven from Chicago to Ann Arbor, she had a meal and drove back, ringing Alice's mother to say that her plans had changed and she wouldn't need to stay overnight after all. No one would think less of her. No one would even know. So making herself actually walk up to Tom's house was hard in a way that nothing in Sybil's life had ever been hard before.

She parked a few streets away but stayed in the car. She told herself she was waiting for the rain to stop, even though the sky was low and dark and it looked as though the weather had settled in for the day. A quarter of an hour passed with no slackening in the downpour. _This is ridiculous,_ she thought, not for the first time. She got out and started to walk.

At the last minute she veered off, taking the cross street before his block. She needed to work herself up to this.

She'd brought an umbrella, but hadn't counted on cowardice. Half an hour later found her still walking the neighborhood, her shoes and the hems of her jeans soaked through, her heart pounding out of all proportion to the moderate exercise. She wasn't even sure what she was afraid of, but had little more idea of what she wanted to happen. Of course she _hoped_ he would welcome her, but that seemed so far out of the realm of possibility that she could hardly admit it to herself.

The tenth time she passed the car she stopped, digging for her keys in her handbag. Time to end this foolishness. _No harm done,_ she told herself, but relief was not what she felt. The harm had been done long ago. She closed herself into the car, but instead of starting it she sat and listened to the sound of rain on metal above her head.

_No. No, I will not give up._

In a sudden fury of determination she sprang outside, her umbrella bursting open like a firework, and slammed the car door so hard the vehicle shook. She marched up the street, blind to everything but the numbers on the houses. She saw the one she wanted, pivoted to the left, and stomped through a dank and gloomy foyer where she checked the bank of post boxes for the one labeled _T. Branson_. Up two flights of stairs to fetch up in front of a solid wood door caked in layers of old paint. Before she could start to think about what would happen when and if it opened, she raised her hand and knocked.

-o-

His _face _when he saw her. His feelings still wrote themselves out so clearly. He went so pale she could see his freckles standing out even after a Michigan winter, his eyes black holes of shock.

_I should never have come._

The realization struck like a machete through the shoulder, leaving her unable to move; otherwise she would have turned and bolted down the stairs. How stupid she'd been to hope, how bloody, _bloody _stupid and thoughtless and _cruel_. Somehow that had never occurred to her, what it might do to _his _mental state to see her after so much time. But she couldn't very well run off now, could she?

She tried to swallow, but her mouth was so dry. Finally she croaked out, "May I come in?"

-o-

The worst of it was that it wasn't wholly awkward. It would almost have been easier if it had been, but Sybil kept getting flashes of their old rapport. While he was talking about his dissertation (she wouldn't have been able to say what it was about if you'd put a gun to her head) he actually smiled, looked a bit like himself: the charming, intelligent, passionate man who'd captivated her at dinner that very first night. Along with the old rapport she felt the old heat, the tingling in her skin, the swoop in her stomach from their first kiss on Brian's hearth, and every kiss after that. Her body seemed unaware of the weight of history between them.

She could tell he was uncomfortable. This was dredging up bad memories for him. When she was gone he'd pace around his flat, pulling his hands through his hair, and he would have no peace: that was what she'd done by coming here. Why hadn't she stayed gone? She could feel him wondering, but she knew he wouldn't ask her because he was waiting for her to leave.

When he asked about the job she almost told him everything right then, only stopping herself with difficulty. Already she'd forgotten she no longer had the right to his ear. Already she'd indulged in wistful, selfish thoughts about picking up where they'd left off, when it was obvious that she was gutting him just by being here.

_I should go._

For a second she thought she'd spoken the words aloud. But he was going on about the weather with a kind of low-grade panic in his eyes, and it was past time for her to release him. She couldn't take back the fact that she'd come any more than she could take back what she'd done two Octobers before, but she could get out of his flat and out of his life, for good this time.

"I'm sorry," she managed, and got to her feet.

-o-

_Keep going,_ she told herself as the stairwell blurred in front of her eyes, her shaking legs threatening to spill her to the landing. _Keep going, don't stop. _If she could just make it to the car. She was already sobbing. At least the foul weather meant that there wouldn't be anyone out on the pavements to stare and ask pityingly, impersonally, if everything was all right.

She could still smell him on herself, feel the heat of him between her legs. The accusing stroke of his voice: _one last fuck._ She hoped that, whatever else, he didn't think that was all she'd wanted. Maybe later she'd be able to hope for more, but now she needed the cocoon of fogged-up car windows, voices of public radio hosts, swish of tires on pavement. She would not think about the way he'd refused to look at her at the end. _I've ruined it, I've bloody ruined it._ It was little comfort to think that the damage had not been done by her visit here today, but long before.

She had no idea how she was going to go on.

She'd thought she was in a bad way before, but that had been tolerable compared to the way she felt now. Before she'd seen Tom she'd had a plan; she'd had the determination to keep going forward no matter what happened. She'd had the blessing (or curse) of her ability to suppress that which was not helpful and do what needed to be done, or at least do something. But he had laid bare the full impact of what she'd done to him with such brutality that she couldn't turn away from it.

_And he won't let me fix it._

She would have to live from now on with the knowledge not just of how she'd broken the person she loved most in the world, but of what kind of person she was. Because when it came down to it, you were the sum of your actions. No, that wasn't right: if it were simple addition and subtraction, then all those people she'd helped in Ghana and Liberia would surely cancel out one broken heart, wouldn't they? Yet her treatment of Tom multiplied in her head, blotting out every good thing she'd done.

One foot in front of the other. Get to the car, _then _collapse.

_Oh God, I'll have to talk to Alice's parents. _That would take all of her willpower. Alice's mother was a physician and she'd be _very _interested in Sybil's work and plans. If only Alice herself were in town, but she had an internship in Washington—

"_Sybil!_"

For a second she thought she'd imagined it, but then the call came again. Afterwards she never remembered walking back to him, or that tortured moment when she waited for him to speak; she only remembered being in his arms, and the blessed certainty that everything was going to be all right.

-o-

She couldn't seem to stop crying. She was happier than she'd been in a long time—maybe ever—but she felt like a breached balloon, all her emotions coming out in a whoosh. The rain made a layer of coolness on his bare skin. She probed for the warmth underneath, the pads of her fingers pressed into his lower back: she was here, and he was real, and he still loved her. The thought brought on another bout of weeping. "Shhh, love, it's all right, shhh," he murmured, gentling her with kisses and comforting nonsense, and how was this possible? She didn't deserve this. And yet he was doing it, his eyes wide with concern through his own tears. At length her crying slowed nearly to a stop, and he blinked as if waking up. "We ought to go inside and get dry."

"Yeah." She grinned, even as hot tears continued down her cheeks. He could have said _We ought to go to hell and have our entrails pulled out by demons_ and her response would have been the same. The stairwell in his house, so forbidding on her last trip up, seemed to shine with its own simple beauty. The door to his flat was ajar, as if he'd run out of it in a tearing hurry. He closed it behind them and she delighted in its solidity, its ugliness, its _door_-ness. It did just what it was meant to, which was to shut the world out. She didn't want the world. She only wanted him. She felt as though two flights of stairs had been far too long to go without having her lips on his, but he stopped her as she leaned in. His palms went to her cheeks and he looked at her with something like pain in his face.

"What is it?" She asked finally. Afraid of the answer, because any pain he felt, she had caused it.

He smiled, and the pained look broke apart. "I can't believe you're actually here."

She couldn't believe how close she'd come to _not _being here. Though it was almost too easy now to think that she'd have come round to it, that it was inevitable for them to have ended up this way. She went up on tiptoe and kissed him, his mouth warm even as his skin remained cool. She couldn't stop touching him; her palms went to either side of his face, fingertips on nascent stubble. She put her mouth on his jaw, scraping her lips along his neck, wanting to feel every texture.

"We should...shower," he mumbled. He was shivering a little, and Sybil realized she was too.

"Mm." She didn't want a shower. She drew him down again. "Bed…" Her lips on his quickening pulse. "...warm." She could feel him laugh through his skin.

They took off their wet clothes before they got in, and pulled the covers as high as their ears. For a while they just held each other, hands stroking any bits they could reach, their eyes sneaking open every so often as if to make sure the other one was really there. Tom rolled on top of her, his lips warm at her jawline. It was worlds away from the last time, him fucking her like he wished his cock was a sword, but it made her think of the look on his face afterward: _I had a bad time of it after you finished with me._

"Oh, no, love, no, don't." He was kissing at the tears that had sprung up.

Her trembling hands found his face and she held him away, so she could look at him. He met her gaze, so much tenderness in his eyes that she almost started sobbing in earnest again. "I love you," she said. "I love you so much."

He sighed, turned his head, and laid it down on her heart.

Tears spurted silently from her eyes as she stroked his shoulders and tried to pretend she wasn't gutted that he hadn't said it back. _I deserve this. This is my fault. _She bit her lip hard. She wouldn't blub, wouldn't make him have to comfort her yet again. He kept silent for several moments; he seemed to be gathering himself.

When he spoke it barely stirred the edge of her hearing. "I love you."

She let out a long shaky breath and he raised his head, regarding her with solemn eyes. This time he didn't shush her, just wiped her tears with the pad of his thumb: methodically, first from one eye, then the other, then back to the first, as though he was prepared to do it for years if necessary. "I don't know if I could stop," he said softly. "No matter what you might do."

She had to close her eyes. "I know it will take a long time for us to get anywhere near back where we were."

"I don't know. I feel…" he paused for so long that she opened her eyes. He was looking off to one side, his eyes almost painfully blue in the colorlessness of the room. "I feel the same as I did before you left. No, not the same. I don't know if this makes sense, but it's as though what we've gone through has made what I feel stronger."

She couldn't help chuckling. "Hating me made you love me more?"

"It's weird, but yeah." He lay his head down again. "And you?"

She felt like she'd had a storm inside her for months. "I did love you, Tom, when we were together before. But...now I'm not sure I quite knew what love was."

"And now you do." He wasn't challenging her, only wanting to know.

"I don't know. But I think I'm a good deal closer to figuring it out."

He looked at her and she wondered if she should say something more, reiterate her promise that she would see it through this time. That she'd never hurt him again. Why should he believe her?

"We're both figuring it out," he said. "Together, yeah?"

She smiled. "Yeah." She kissed him, and his arms went round her, and they didn't talk for a while after that.


End file.
